Haunts, horrors in Gothic film series
What in the world is “To Kill a Mockingbird” doing in a horror retrospective?
SFMOMA’s ambitious and intriguing series “Modern Cinema: Haunted! Gothic Tales by Women” begins with a horror classic — “Frankenstein” (7 p.m. Thursday, July 18), Universal’s tentpole blockbuster that starred Boris Karloff as the monster and was, to put it mildly, not author Mary Shelley’s original vision.
From there, the twisted branches of the schedule take us to some interesting places. Vampire flicks like Neil Jordan’s “Interview With the Vampire” (6:30 p.m. Saturday, July 20), Kathryn Bigelow’s “Near Dark” (Aug. 1) and Ana Lily Amirpour’s Iranian indie hit “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” (Aug. 8); ghost stories such as the original version of Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting” (7 p.m. Thursday, July 25) and Jennifer Kent’s amazing 2014 directorial debut, “The Babadook” (Aug. 25).
But the series also includes several films that aren’t explicitly horror movies, but feature characters who are haunted — and not necessarily by supernatural presences. Thus, we have two versions of Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” — the 1939 William Wyler original and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version (both July 27); Alamedaborn filmmaker Cary Fukunaga’s 2011 version of Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” (also July 27); and weirdly Gothic tales such as Peter Weir’s adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s novel “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (Aug. 3), Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” (Oprah sighting! Aug. 10), Jean Cocteau’s sumptuous 1946 French film “Beauty and the Beast” (Aug. 17) and the curtaindropper, Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” (Aug. 31).
The key word here in the series title is “Gothic,” a term that SFMOMA manager of film programs Gina Basso used liberally in order to cast a wide, tangled web in programming the festival.
“The issues that these films are bringing up can really help us to work through some of the ills of our contemporary living,” Basso said. “I think that’s why I love the genre so much, because it works through our society, our issues with gender, the power dynamics between the oppressor and the oppressed.”
Like “To Kill a Mockingbird” (Aug. 10). The classic adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel of race relations in 1930s rural Alabama is a searing drama and an emotional story of injustice. Basso pairs that with “Beloved,” making for a Southern Gothic double feature.
Southern Gothic, Basso said, imports much of the same psychological tropes as traditional English Gothic, but “instead of decaying castles you have decaying plantations, decaying churches, desolate landscapes . ... A lot of Southern Gothic tropes explore the idea of human frailty. Characters can be rendered very grotesque. There’s always an overriding sense of alienation and dread, the harbingers of America’s dark past — which is racism and economic equality and issues of class and gender.”
Unlike past Modern Cinema series, “Haunted!” isn’t crammed into a threeweek ThursdaythroughSunday schedule, but is spread out over six weeks of Thursdays and Saturdays. It’s part of a new effort by SFMOMA to have a looser but more consistent, yearround presence, Basso said.
While the series, which contrasts classic cinema with similarly themed modern cinema, will remain about three times a year, the museum’s Phyllis Wattis Theater won’t go dark between series. Other series, plus initiatives like a regular Friday matinee, are designed to keep the projection booth buzzing.
But back to “Haunted!” Although all of the films are based on stories by women, one of the problems Basso encountered is that most of these great films are directed by men. Only six of the 24 films are directed or codirected by women. Four of those were made in this decade — the most current film in the series, Brazil’s “As Boas Maneiras” (”Good Manners”), which screens Aug. 24, was made in 2018 by directors Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra. The earliest is Bigelow’s 1987 classic, “Near Dark.”
“There’s a lot of men behind the camera,” Basso said. “I do like the idea that most of these began as a literary source written by women . ... I like that dichotomy, and looking at the original source as something to celebrate.”
From this corner, one of the most intriguing selections is “BeDevil,” a trilogy of horror stories that is the first feature directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman, the artist, photographer and filmmaker Tracey Moffatt. Make plans for that rarity that is tucked away in a 3:45 p.m. slot on a Saturday, Aug. 17. Shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993, it has never been released on home video here and rarely screens — the visuals are eyepopping.
Basso said her favorite selection is “The Haunting,” which pretty much sums up her thoughts on a genre of “repressed desire, buried secrets.”
“It’s one of my favorite films,” she said. “I’m the kind of person who likes it when the imagination is doing all the work. There’s some films that show you the horror, but this one is a really classic haunted house story that operates on a purely psychological manner.”